
Success Story: BeeGraphix & Caldera PrimeCenter
October 10, 2024
From Screen Printing to Seamless Automation with PrimeCenter
BeeGraphix’s commitment to high-quality custom graphics and excellent customer service, combined with the challenges of the pandemic, pushed them to adopt a new way of doing business. We spoke with BeeGraphix VP, Davis Slagle, to learn how the company partnered with clients to launch 900 live online stores and help raise $1.2 million for local fundraisers.
Celebrating two decades of telling customers’ stories
BeeGraphix was founded in 2004 with a commitment to quality and a mission to supply superior custom graphics for sports teams, businesses and fundraisers. “We started out in 2004 as a very rudimentary mom-and-pop screen print shop,” says Davis. “It was all manual processes, with really laborious file organization. In those early years, we did what we knew how to do, and we didn’t know how to do anything better.”
BeeGraphix specializes in creating tangible, high-quality customized products, ranging from sports apparel and promotional goods to laser-engraved items and outdoor advertising. They pursue a client-centric approach that emphasizes collaboration and customer satisfaction, and they understand the importance of timing. Tight schedules drive events and promo activities, making fast turnarounds crucial. “We mostly produce decorated apparel through more than 1,000 web stores. This includes printed or embroidered garments like hoodies and company swag, much of which is used for fundraising.”
A new way of thinking
By connecting the front end to Switch and Caldera PrimeCenter, we reduced 8 to 12 hours of human labor each day to just 20 or 30 minutes of supervision.
“By the time the pandemic hit, we were processing a couple of hundred online stores and managing brick-and-mortar stores for our customers. In other words, we would launch a B2B2C operation with a partner, where they would sell to their customers and we would fill the goods – things like company stores and sports teams. The focus was on screen printing at this time. But when the pandemic arrived, the world changed their buying habits, and we had to shut down for 4 months. We couldn’t sell, we had no way of producing and people weren’t putting in bulk orders.”
But what Davis did realize was that people were buying in small numbers from e-commerce sites like Etsy. He continues, “We realized that we had no way to successfully manage that level of production. Trying to figure things out, we started to dabble in the world of direct-to-film printing. We were one of the first companies in the US to import this equipment from China in its early infancy. The quality was terrible, and the machines were pretty rickety, but we managed to make it work.”
This was essentially a switch from the bulk orders of screen printing to a print-on-demand model. “We wanted to be able to process 50, 100, 300 or even 500 different designs a day at scale. That’s something you couldn’t do with manual processes.”
Automation was the only answer. “After much research and investment, we found a solution to speed up the process. By connecting the front end to Switch and then to Caldera PrimeCenter, we reduced 8 to 12 hours of human labor each day to just 20 or 30 minutes of supervision.”
Getting the various software programs connected and communicating was time-consuming because what we had didn’t want to play nice. But once we figured out how to get around it and get what we needed, we made the system work. The team at TriBay, the print automation experts, helped us get to the point where we had a functional workflow. It has greatly increased what we we’re able to produce in a day. Instead of someone sitting on a computer, they’re actually doing 10 other things, instead of sitting there tiling just 1 or 2 designs. It’s been one of our greatest assets in the last year for increasing sales.”
The advantages of using Caldera PrimeCenter
PrimeCenter automatically resizes our artwork based on whether a shirt is youth-small or youth-medium or adult-xxx. It can scale the print to fit the shirt. We’ve saved so much in waste and downtime from having to go back and reprint stuff!
Preparing and collating files in PrimeCenter is giving back operator time on the company’s DTF operations. “In the past, we would look manually at packets and pool files, and there was at least a three to five percent error rate due to the human operator clicking on the wrong file. Someone would pick the wrong file for the artwork, but that doesn’t happen anymore. PrimeCenter knows which one it’s supposed to pick and cuts out human error.”
“The second advantage with PrimeCenter,” continues Davis, “is that we’ve been able to set up sizing guides. It will automatically resize our artwork based on whether a shirt is youth-small or youth-medium or adult-xxx. It can scale the print to fit the shirt. By figuring this out, we’ve saved so much in waste and downtime from having to go back and reprint stuff.”
“Finally, when it comes to tiling, we would have to go manually and pick each file, drag it to our previous RIP software, go get the next one, drag that to the RIP. That’s where we’re seeing savings of eight to 10 hours, because we could really only do one file per minute. On a busy day, needing to do 1,000 files, that was a lot of labor and we would get behind. Now, by 10.00am everything is ready to run.”
Having Caldera PrimeCenter has made a huge difference to the BeeGraphix workflow. But Davis can see other areas for future development, including roll-to-roll cutting. “Transferring a cut file to cutting equipment will be the next step in automating our print production. Then, the next evolution will be barcoding or having design cues printed at the bottom, which I know PrimeCenter can do. So for us, that will be the next area of tech to invest in.”
BeeGraphix is moving in the right direction and taking advantage of everything PrimeCenter can offer on the path to a fully automated workflow.
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